The field of desire: A review of Madeleine Wattenberg's I/O

 
 
 
 
 

Do you remember the story of Io? Princess of Argos, coveted by a god, turned to heifer by Zeus, her lover, or Hera, her lover’s wife? How the forsaken spouse instructed the giant Argus, with his thousand eyes, to watch over her; how the adulterer sent his son, Hermes, to slay her captor. How she wandered the earth, stalked by Hera’s gadfly, until she reached the River Nile. How could we forget such a thing?

This story is one of transformation. The ancient accounts agree that the mortal Io was changed into a cow and wandered the earth, often citing Egypt as her final resting place. But if transformation is the theme of this story, then desire is its impetus. A knotty relationship between the gods—a concupiscent Zeus, a scornful Hera—give it its form. Each claim either side of the coin of desire; when flipped, they determine Io’s fate. This story is, therefore, triangulated amongst these three figures: Io, Hera and Zeus. No matter where we observe ourselves in the cycle of desire, we find at least one of them staring back.

For her first collection, Madeleine Wattenberg identifies as the Io of her story. In this four-part debut (aptly titled I/O), we locate a familiar reflection as Wattenberg slips between allusion and homage, tethering herself to her mythological counterpart in her own triangulated narrative. Rather than follow in the trend of contemporary retellings, Wattenberg instead invokes Io, exploring her occasionally metaphorical, often literal relationship to the daughter of Inachus through a series of epistles:

“Io,

I was just a little unclean when he dressed me in the bride’s
cloth. Did the veil also weigh your spine until you crouched
to the floor on hard fists? Gold poked like two horns from my
crown.”

In this text, Io serves as both mentor and cautionary tale. Once we realize just how closely author and figure mirror one another, we begin to recognize the signs: our gaze is increasingly drawn to the eyes that watch Wattenberg, to the flies that antagonize her. Across eleven epistolary poems, each carrying the same title (“Dear Io”), Wattenberg brings the depth of this connection to bear. This is a story whose pages read nearly the same in either direction.

“He flew upon me. Flies always liked me best. I’ve
transformed. He transformed me. I don’t know my own mind.
I raised my hands, but the light obscured them down to the
wrist.”

To explore transformation, the poet calls upon myth; it is not difficult to see why. The gods are in love with transformation. Sometimes, as Wattenberg notes, this change occurs in the mind as when Io’s descendent, Dionysus, whips the women of Thebes into a frenzy that leads to the death of their king, Pentheus. More frequently, as in the case of Io, this change occurs in the body. What is unique about Io’s transformation is who does the transforming: often, Zeus changes his form so as to seize the objects of his desire, what we might call an auto-affection for his affection; e.g., Leda, Danae, even Hera. The story of Io is different; it signifies a reversal for readers who willingly transform themselves for those they love but are unable to effect a similar change in their beloveds. The collection I/O is also different in that it shows us this transformation need not take place only at the hands of the gods.

“Recently, I have thought of changing
my hair and my attitude toward the person I love.”

                                                            *

“He pushed my palms into the earth. On all fours, the horizon
disappears entirely. Or perhaps I merely closed my eyes.”

As another poet once told us in her study of the bittersweet eros, the lover wishes to freeze the beloved in time. One other way to say this: to stop them from ever changing. The story of Io is unique in that the beloved changes when the gods reach the limit of desire; I/O is a unique text because Wattenberg does not stop at this edge. As the collection progresses, Wattenberg widens her gaze—from Io, from her epistles—to the present day. Ours is an entirely different world than the Greeks’.

“Rain riddles the window. Your equations cross the whiteboard
like bird feet in snow. How far did you go in the space between
our minds? Did you enter the universe’s reflection? Did you let
the ancient waves scatter to pigment in your new blue eyes? But
what about the very beginning? Don’t ask, you say. There was no
time. You cannot imagine it.”

Transformation occurs outside the confines of desire. This is a natural fact as opposed to the systems of relations we have been exploring. Science can change our bodies. It does so all the time. Instances of triangulation remain—think, for example, the various states of matter—but often these tensions are reduced to binary oppositions. If you require evidence, simply look to the title of this collection: what previously appeared to us a reference to mythology can now be read in terms of input/output operations—I/O. A modern-day deity as powerful as the king of gods.

By shifting the mode of transformation, the field of desire changes. Where there once were three bodies, now only two remain. In the collection’s middle sections, Wattenberg is careful to remind us of this: “Two gold cubes on a scale— / how do you make one weigh more than the other / without addition or subtraction?” This riddle is raised by her partner who resembles in occupation her uncle and her father. Her partner is a scientist; Wattenberg is a writer. This is a binary opposition. Meanwhile, desire is busy devising its own riddle: what must one surrender to resolve this tension?

“I let go. You go on.
I let go. You go on in a green boat.
I let go. You go on in a green boat toward a green shore.

[…]

I let go. You go on in a green boat toward a green shore and
when you turned it was to make sure you’d left none
of the parts of yourself, not even an outline of what
hovers over the glass waves, the watery threshold
holding, holding, held, a hand
I let go.”

Although her desire resides in this world, Wattenberg locates her counterpart in another. This exegesis carries the form of another useful binary. Carefully examined, it should allow us to identify Wattenberg’s poetic influences as well as her movement between these two places. In her antepenultimate poem, “Coin Toss,” we discover the name she has given this binary: locus amoenus.

The Greeks understood longing for another world. The concept of the locus amoenus arrived at a time when the city (polis) was solidifying its position as the nexus of Greek life; by contrast, nature (physis) was losing ground, its savagery increasingly subordinated to the architecture and laws (nomos) of humans. The locus amoneus is rooted in this transition: as the divide between the city and nature, nomos and physis, became more pronounced, the landscape became an idealized reprieve from the polis. Greek literature reflects this yearning: though traces of the locus amoenus date as far back as Homer, it was not codified as a concept until Theocritus’ Idylls and the advent of pastoral poetry—that is, the reemergence of the landscape. This tradition persisted through Roman verse, notably with Virgil’s Ecologes (best understood, perhaps, as a reworking of the Idylls); Wattenberg’s awareness of this tradition is best encompassed by her lone citation of the Io myth: an epigraph taken from Roland Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. What Wattenberg wishes to cross is the distance between our world and another.

But the coordinates of this gap are nothing like her forbearers’. How could they be? If the Greeks lived in the age of the polis—of the nomos and the logos—then ours is the post-atomic age, as Wattenberg reminds us with her references to Fermi and her nuclear family. The world is no longer characterized by our attempt to separate ourselves from nature; instead, it is ruled by our success in weaponizing it. This distinction defines Wattenberg’s locus amoenus and her location in this text: it is not the city she wishes to escape but science. This longing pulls at her from either direction, freezing her once more in the center. She constantly slips between the I/O (“An outside. An inside. / One can assume salt in a rough wet mouth”) and the I, O (“I, O, / your name an assertion of presence negated by / exclamation—"). She is forced to decide whether she wishes to be the Wattenberg of this world or the Io of another. This is where she meets the edge of desire.

“I don’t think you can truly pity someone you
have ever met, just a vague ghost as it traverses your mind.
You must have been horrified at their pity after wanting only a
recessional of shells. Io, I pity you.”

By now, we have excavated the conceptual grounds upon which this collection is built, but that is all we have done. There remains the frame of its structure that we can only highlight here: Wattenberg’s use of coins and violence as a way to bookend her narrative [“Charon’s Obol”]; consumption’s presence, both in myth and present day [“Poem in Which the Trojan Horse Burns Blue”, “Aphagia”]; the suffering of women, both in myth and present day [“Ars Mythos”, “Osteoclasts”]; consumption’s presence in the suffering of women [“Consumption Triptrych”]; Wattenberg’s rendering of the myth of Io [“Name”]; as well as the question she raises at the start of I/O but never quite answers: what, and who, do we pray to in the name of desire [“Invocation to Flame”]? This work is defined as much by these themes as it is those previous concepts, and their interweaving presence in the text is evidence of a steady hand. For her first collection, Madeleine Wattenberg has pushed the boundaries of our engagement with myth by traversing the field of desire. It is an admirable debut. It is perhaps most admirable when asking what Io of Argos never could: once transformed, who are we to blame for our transformation?

Z. L. Nickels is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His writing has previously appeared with Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, Rupture, and Critical Flame. He is currently working on his first novel, which examines the consequences of the death of the Great God Pan.

 
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